In today's society distribution of articles across the world is ever increasing. With this development follows development of automatic storage enterprises for quickly and automatically being able to sort and distribute articles to clients.
U.S. Pat. application U.S. Pat. No. 6,139,240 A1 shows an automatic storage/sorting system that has a number of transport conveyors, wherein a first number of conveyors extend in a first direction and a second number of conveyors extend in a second direction. The first number of conveyors is used for storing articles to be sorted and the second number of conveyors is used for distributing the articles to receivers, or at least to storage places associated with the respective receiver.
European patent EP 1310441 describes a system in an automated storage which has a number of transport conveyors in different levels. Each level has at least one first transport conveyor for distributing the articles and one second conveyor, perpendicular to the first conveyor for transporting distributed articles to different storages for different article receivers.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,782 shows an automatized storage with a number of storage conveyors arranged in a plurality of layers. Each layer further has transversely extending conveyors that can be driven both backwards and forwards.
US patent application US 2009/0242356 shows a sorting system with transport conveyors where the conveyors are arranged in a matrix system. This sorting system has a plurality of first conveyors on which different articles may be positioned and a plurality of second conveyors, each second conveyor being associated with a receiver of articles, such as a storage location. The plurality of second conveyors extends in a direction perpendicular to the plurality of first conveyors. A transfer conveyor is provided for transferring articles from one of the first conveyors to one of the second conveyors.
In such sorting systems each receiver of articles (i.e. client) has one second conveyor/second number of conveyor of its own. This means that if there are many different receivers there has to be many second conveyors and the system will become very big. Consequently, with many second conveyors, the system will be expensive and need lots of space.
Therefore, there is a need for an article sorting system that can handle sorting of many different articles to many different receivers in a less expensive way and that needs less space for realization than in the prior art.